Reforged from Ruin [Eldritch Xianxia Cultivation]

The voices ring and echo. Items come and go.

Raika carves herself open, and offers of herself unto the masses.

They offer her swords that can fly, palaces that can shrink, words written in books so ancient that to look on them is to threaten they turn to ash.

They offer her rings with precious fruits, and stories of where they come from, and promises of things yet to come.

She almost universally takes the latter over the former.

There are exceptions. As the sects begin to move, properly informed of the rules now that their "lessers" have dared to walk ahead of them, they offer her some things that even she can't easily refuse. Lands that bear chains in their owning, which she takes without care for their weight; remnants of ancient beasts, laden with secrets and alien forms; the bodies and tools of saints and elders, long gone, laden with Dao and hints of deeper truths.

But almost always, she takes what is offered from the cultivators in the front stands.

They offer her what they have, and she sees in them that it matters. They offer unto her the fruits of life-bending labors, the weights of treasures held in the darkest of nights and brightest of days, oaths of true and lasting servitude- things that cannot be measured in gold or stones, and which mean more to those offering than riches mean to the rich.

And she pulls herself apart for them.

At first, blood, collected in droplets and rivulets and streams, enough to fill a body many times over. Then bone, carefully plucked out of ligaments, carved free from wider trunks, sculpted wholesale for the purposes of the exchange. Only as the auction truly reaches a fever pitch does she begin to cut deeper, bringing out loops of intestine, slivers of liver, pieces of lung and strands of heart.

An auction can last for days, she's been told.

She brings proof to the statement. There are always those with more to offer, and she is a beast of plenty, starving and feeding in equal measure.

And for every trade, for every sacrifice, for every offer accepted and material exchanged, she offers a whispered promise that binds the world to itself;

"By my word and my will, as my life is My Own, this belongs to you."

And so it is said, and so it is. Glory be.

Glory Be.

The loose cultivators of the stands gain more from the hours she spends carving than they did the hours beforehand, betting with spirit stones and hidden artifacts. Before they leave here, many of them will become genuine threats to sect disciples, the distance between those with money and those without at last carved into by Raika's offerings. Some of them are geniuses, prodigies left with little recourse and left to starve, alone in the world, and they will change what is to come on the backs of what they have gained here. Others are not and have never been exceptional, left behind by the world and the powers that be, and they too now gain a chance to step forward on paths all their own.

She does not give of herself freely, but she does give, and the masses of the powerful and the low alike sup on the flesh that is offered.

The first fight is an unexpected one.

Three bids rise above the rest- a deed to a home, isolated in the reaches of the lakes between the peaks of Morae's Lament, a pebble which glimmers strangely during sunrise, and a painting made entirely of different strokes of black ink. Each one has value to those that offer them, and each one has an appeal to Raika herself.

She goes to choose- and the weakest amidst the three, his face pinched, his cheeks flushed, challenges her.

His treasure was the least enticing overall, but it is clear that his painting was crafted with genuine feeling, real emotion and suffering, and when the others laugh at the offer, he refuses to back down.

Stubborn stupidity? Maybe. He's in the Core Formation realm, far enough below her that she could kill him with an errant swipe.

Instead, she holds still, and lets him strike her as hard as he can.

The cut and bruise that form from his technique, a collection of flowers that fuse together into a larger cannon and fire a Qi-infused thorn, would heal on its own in a few minutes. He looks like he might break down on stage at the sight.

She spends a moment of will, and the flesh is healed.

She accepts his bid.

But, as with all good things, it is not without its difficulties. As with all good plans, this too must contend with enemy action.

"A rock," says a voice that echoes through the room.

Raika looks up, her arms dripping with blood, her robes stained with it, and stares at the figure descending.

They're not from the highest of booths, those reserved for the five Peaks, but they're close. Close enough that she has no doubt they're related; the powerful love a good patsy, almost as much as they love plausible deniability in general. The figure is young, or at least appears so, their face barely past adolescence- and yet their cultivation is striking. A soul, very nearly fully realized, sits in the core of their being, a half-step into the Warrior Realm, and the figure that wields such power glows with a subtle hue, like the light refracts around them.

Raika cocks her head to one side, calmly holding out the heart that's still beating in her palm.

"I offer a rock," they repeat into the silence, floating down on their own power towards the stage. "And I accept the offered challenge."

Raika grins wide, the same hungry, predatory smile that has swum to the surface more than once throughout the proceedings. "The challenge has been extended and accepted. Won't you convince me of your prize?"

The young woman doesn't bother with further talk. She has a mission here, though Raika's not sure how it's been coached to her, and she seems a dedicated sort of disciple.

The world bends, the stage's arrays straining as they struggle to contain the forces being so casually unleashed by the cultivator. Those with lesser cultivation are forced back from the stage, clearing room around the combatants, and all the world centers its gaze on the performance to come.

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The cultivator raises a hand, and the world whistles, like a pressurized tea-kettle. Some sort of refraction and compression technique, perhaps- and its wielder does not hold back.

The stage is partially transformed, overtaken by a Domain of black glass and strange floating prisms, and from out of that alien landscape, a figure of glowing light and infinite shadow rises, and is refracted, and reaches through the hand of the cultivator into their technique-

Raika shatters her jaw.

The cultivator has time to blink exactly once before Raika's second strike hits their wrist, followed by a third, fourth, and fifth: ribs, then her pelvis, and then her ribs again.

The cultivator is no pushover, obviously- whether a young prodigy or a core disciple with a weirdly specific body image, they're not powerless to resist. Each blow could shatter stone, turn metal to crumpled, glowing tissue, and instead they barely break bone. The ground beneath Raika's feet cuts into her even through her armor, the prisms reflecting light and shadow such as to carve into her body like lasers, and the Soul behind it all has enough power to make parts of her skin begin to burn.

There's a trick to winning fights faster than people expect.

It's not caring if you get hurt.

The cultivator's technique goes wild, hitting off-target; a bubble of air is compressed and pressurized, enough that it calcifies and begins to burn under the effects of some strange Truth, and Raika is partially caught in it. One arm, part of her face, and part of her left side are all half-vaporized, leaving only the underlying nanoscale armor and more esoteric materials intact.

But she doesn't regenerate. She doesn't bother to even pretend to care that half her body has been shattered away from her.

She just walks over to the broken figure of the cultivator, crouches over them, dripping crimson and indigo onto the floor of the stage.

From a faceless maw of all-teeth, she smiles down at her. "Your bid is not accepted."

She nudges the cultivator with her foot until she rolls off the stage, her body struggling to regenerate from perforated lungs, and raises her one remaining arm wide.

A dozen worlds press down towards her, pressing into the space of the stage. She sees some of the arrays spark, overloaded much as they were in her viewing booth, but this time with a sea of different concepts clashing awkwardly.

Her performance earns her the enmity of more than a few figures up above… but not all of them.

She does so love it when things are going according to plan.

If the Warrior Realm masters fight here, thousands will die, their own members among the tally. The auction house will be destroyed, the reputation of the sects involved besmirched, and, worst of all, they don't know if they'll win.

Her blood and bone is potent enough to fight over, sure, and yet she stands free of worry, seemingly unbothered by the damage to her form, nearly invisible to Qi-senses in spite of the power she just showed. It's incongruous- another way of saying "doesn't make sense". She's hiding something, never revealing more of her cards than she actually needs to, and anyone who's anyone can tell.

Precisely as intended.

Even if one were to be so bold as to defy the conventions they're all trapped by, brave enough to take her on with such limited information, they are shackled by the knowledge that they're not the only sharks in the water. Once the rules of the auction are defied, everything becomes a free-for-all, with each sect greedy enough to want the whole prize (so all of them, obviously) launching themselves into the fray.

The first shark to get cut by its prey or a stray tooth will bleed into the water as freely as their intended target.

Sharks can be discerning, nearly clever, more passive than most people think- but in a feeding frenzy, wrapped in a feast of slaughter, who can blame them for thinking with their noses before their little minds?

If one of the sect elders or powerhouses comes down to fight her, they draw the wrath of the Watchful Fields and Dancing Clouds sects both. They open themselves to backstabbing, an easy target for slander and judgement against an enemy they know little about, and even if they win, the slightest weakness will unleash the other predators waiting in the wings on them instead of her. And if it doesn't, she's sure there are alliances in place eager to interfere with any one player getting such a massive reward.

If they all chose a path of mutual cooperation, of protecting each other or even just standing aside and swearing nonaggression against whoever tries first, she'd be fucked.

But she doesn't need to memorize millennia of history to have guessed that they'd rather do almost anything but.

The cultivator lands on the floor of the stands, servants and weaker cultivators with her same sect colors rushing to her aid, and Raika bows. She waits until the exact moment that they lift the half-conscious cultivator up, administering a healing pill to her as she coughs up blood, before regrowing even an ounce of damaged flesh and rising.

Her smile is no less horrifying or joyful for having skin over it.

"Unfortunately, the bid of 'a rock' has been dismissed," she says, letting her words carry as her robes reform over freshly-generated muscle tissue and bone. "The challenge has been rebuked. Bids are still open for my beating heart."

Yet again, stunned shock holds the tongues of the thousand or more cultivators staring at the show she just put on.

And then, at last-

"The hand of my son as a husband."

The words echo down from a mid-tier sect's viewing booth, off to the right side. Not a major power, but not the least among them, thought she doubt's it's by a wide margin.

She hears it in the voice, in spite of the privacy filters that the booths still hold. She hears it in the way it shakes, in the taste of the phonetics, in the tremble she sees as it travels through the air.

An old man. Old, even by cultivator's standards, and actually affected by that age.

But the trembling comes from will overtaking dread, rather than infirmity.

It matters to him. His son is someone he genuinely treasures, and she's sure by the muffled sounds of movement in the booth that they didn't expect him to offer something so valuable.

"The bid is valid," Raika says, her tone cold but not unkind. "Unless another can outbid?"

The auditorium is silent.

She can taste them all here, bypassing defenses meant first and foremost to protect from Qi senses or divination. The independent cultivators, horrified and awed and shocked at what has been put on offer. The other sects, suddenly discovering just how willing some of their upper class are willing to sacrifice, and how little she cares for the money they might offer in place of something that matters.

"Sold, for the union of one life to another.

""By my word and my will, as my life is My Own, this belongs to you," she whispers- and the heart vanishes, replaced by another already beating in her chest.

She doesn't bother to hesitate, doesn't wait for anyone to properly process what's just happened. Her hands reach to her face, their tips sharpening, reaching, extending into the muscles of her skull-plate.

She slips, for just a moment, as the pain hits- but it's just pain. It's just pain.

She can do more.

She has to do more.

So the pain doesn't matter.

Still smiling, she tears through the tissue holding her jaw together, reaching deep into her throat to slowly tear out her own tongue.

The wet coughing she emits echoes through the chamber, and then she holds the relic up, letting her control over it slip to allow its aura to radiate into the auction house.

"The tongue of one who speaks True-speak, torn still-living into the world," she says. She smiles, the feeling of the new tongue in her throat alien and perfectly natural all at once. "Bidding begins."

It is not the last fight she faces before the auction is done. It is not the only one she wins.

In the end, she has offered herself a dozen times over, carved open by her own hand again and again… and holds in her hands exactly what she needs for the next step of her plans.